Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/89

Rh As early as 1740, at the performances of opera, the audience could no longer understand the words of the singers unless it followed them in the libretto: the accompaniment smothered the voices. And the dramatic orchestra continued to develop throughout the century. "The immoderate use of the instrumental accompaniment" says Gerber, "has become a general fashion." The orchestra swamped the theatre to such an extent that at a very early period it freed itself from it, and claimed in itself to be theatre and drama. As early as 1738, Scheibe, who with Mattheson was the most intelligent of the German musicologists, was writing symphony-overtures, which expressed "the content of the pieces," after the fashion of Beethoven's overtures for Coriolanus and Leonora. I will not speak of the descriptions in music which abounded in Germany about 1720, as we see from Mattheson's bantering remarks in his Critica Musica. The movement came from Italy, where Vivaldi and Locatelli, under the influence of the opera, were writing programme concertos which were spreading all over Europe.